Friday, November 18, 2011

Hacker Group Attacks Cop, Claims Solidarity With Occupy Wall Street

Hackers affiliated with the groups Antisec and Anonymous said Friday that they were releasing over 38,000 private emails belonging to Fred Baclagan, a former Special Agent Supervisor of the California Department of Justice who oversaw computer crime investigations.

In a notice published on Pastebin.com, they wrote that they had hijacked two of the investigator's gmail accounts. The released emails include "detailed computer forensics techniques, investigation protocols as well as highly embarrassing personal information," they said in the release.

Over the last five months, Antisec has waged a computer hacking campaign against those in the law enforcement industry. In June, the group broke into the email accounts of Arizona state police officers,, leaking tax information, phone numbers and email exchanges. At the time they described the attack as an act of retaliation for the state's harsh immigration policies. Soon after the leak, the wife of one officer received a bomb threat over the phone.

In the notice, the group drew special attention to Baclagan's six-year email correspondence with other members of the International Association of Computer Investigative Specialists, a nonprofit organization of law enforcement members. Those emails reportedly "detail the methods and tactics cybercrime units use to gather electronic evidence, conduct investigations and make arrests," according to the release. "The information in these emails will prove essential to those who want to protect themselves from the techniques and procedures cyber crime investigators use to build cases."

Unlike earlier hacks by the group, this one comes at a time when talk of police brutality and abuse is happening all over the Internet. In its notice, the group drew on the rhetoric of Occupy Wall Street: "You want to keep mass arresting and brutalizing the 99%? We'll have to keep owning your boxes and torrenting your mail spools, plastering your personal information all over teh [sic] internets."

Reached at his private number, which the group published online, Baclagan said he'd never been involved in crackdowns on political activists. He said he specialized in identity theft, and in any case retired last year. "I'm really just a nobody," he said, "just a local investigator, not involved in anything dynamic or dramatic.